While everybody at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was preoccupied with Donald Trump’s triumphal story after the assassination attempt and the prospect of near-certain victory in November, I dwelled on that low-rumble question of the 2024 election: where’s Melania? She had not made one campaign appearance, nor been at her husband’s side for his myriad courtroom dates. A theme of the proceedings was the adoration of Trump family members for their patriarch. From the stage, his sons and their wives extolled him as the greatest family man of all time. But no Melania. Finally, at the last moment on Thursday, when her husband had already left the VIP box, sphinx-face as always, she showed. No explanation or excuses were offered – and never are.
For such a media-tuned showman as Trump, it surprised me that he would pick a 39-year-old as his vice president. From my view on the convention floor, it was a harsh contrast, the 78-year-old looking markedly more grizzled under his dye and tan since the shooting, and Vance, so baby-faced he’d needed to grow a beard for additional gravitas. Sitting among the Trump family, Vance looked remarkably like Trump’s sons with their beards. Perhaps Trump’s calculation was that Vance, who had undergone a dramatic conversion from contempt to obeisance, would be a similar sort of acolyte. Trump, if he wins, will re-enter the presidency already term-limited, a lame-duck from day one. He will surely have greater control of the inevitable power struggles around him with a devoted heir apparent.
Milwaukee, by the way, isn’t another hollowed-out industrial hulk in the Midwest, an example of Trump’s core message of economic failure, but a city whose 19th-century factories and brewery warehouses have been gentrified to house boutiques, coffee shops, galleries and the new professional class. It’s a haven for med tech and financial services companies, with realtors selling its Lake Michigan beachfront and water views. I might have taken an extra day to explore this unexpected city but, tipped off that the Republicans would shortly be eclipsed by Democratic party seismic events and eager to get back to that soap opera, I was lucky to get out of Milwaukee before the global tech glitch delayed most flights.
Over little more than six weeks, Trump has been convicted of 34 felonies; a 90-minute debate upset all the reasonable assumptions about the race, and even the certainty of who Trump would be running against; Trump was scheduled, days before the convention, to be sentenced for his crimes, with a good probability of receiving jail time, but, then, days before his court date, the Supreme Court upended most of the legal challenges and peril Trump had faced; with Biden insisting he’ll continue as the Democrats’ nominee, the tight margin-of-error polling, which had held steady for a year, was giving Trump a clear advantage in every swing state and showing a weakening in solid Democratic states – a landslide in the making; then, a gunman takes aim and fires. What seems clear is a deluge of events only propels more events. That wherever we are now will not be where we are minutes from now – a difficult place for political prognosticators.
My Democratic sources, all believing they are near to the heartbeat of party power and money, have assured me over the past few weeks that Joe Biden is the irrefutable nominee or that he is toast. That contradictory view certainly has been reflected in the media from one news cycle to the next: Joe is dug in and nobody can get him out, or in a report minutes later, there is no political reality in which he can continue. The assassination seemed to shift media attention from Biden and give him a meaningful moment to regroup. But then, in a footnote event in the cascade of events, Biden got Covid, and, if the end had not been written before, it was now. Monday was the authoritative date my authoritative sources guaranteed he would withdraw. But it was Sunday.
Within 24 hours, the Democrats had coalesced around Kamala Harris, next to Biden the candidate Trump seemed most readily poised to beat. Smarter-seeming people had urged the party to mount a reality-show-type bake-off that would dominate the news, rivet the nation and deprive Trump of the media air he needs to breathe. But caught in the headlights, the Democrats’ strong line-up of energetic swing-state governors froze, neither willing to take on the difficult gender/racial politics of the party nor Trump, with his fearsome abilities to destroy most every opponent in his path. Yet tomorrow is another unpredictable news day with Harris perhaps able to reinvent herself as the Trump killer, that elusive creature.
Michael Wolff is the author of three books on Donald Trump and host of the iHeart radio podcast series, Fire and Fury.
Comments